Everyday Fun

This is such a wonderful place for the girls to grow up, and Jeff and I talk about how grateful we are all the time.

One great thing is that our neighborhood is safe and easy to explore.  Our street dead ends one house after ours, so Elena has a nice safe area to work on her walking.

Inside the house, we have enough space for a sofa cushion obstacle course which her stuffed tiger joins her on.

At least half of her vocabulary at this point is animal names and sounds.  Jeff got her this tiger shirt on one of his trips.  She will point to the tiger on her shoulder and give a pint sized roar.

The safe neighborhood and big house is great for Vivian too.  She and her friends can bike around, and when they want to play at the house, it's big enough for them to do so without waking up Elena from her nap.  This is really saying something, since most of their games seem to involve shrieking and giggling.  

Most of Vivian's neighborhood friends are American, but through the international school she has made an international assortment of friends.  This past Tuesday was an ideal example.  The kids had the day off for Coronation Day which is a celebration of the day the current king was crowned.  He's been king since 1946, but he was crowned Rama IX on May 5, 1950, which makes him Thailand's longest reigning monarch and adds extra fun to Cinco de Mayo.  Since the holiday fell on a Tuesday, most people just stayed in town and planned play dates.  In the morning, Vivian had a play date with a friend from Israel, and in the afternoon one of her Thai friends invited over a busload of kids.  I brought Vivian to the school for the pick up.  Vivian was the only kid on the bus whose parents were both from the States.  In addition to Thai kids, there was also one from Vietnam, one from Korea, one whose parents were Indian, and one who was half British and half Swedish.  I love that these will not just be places on a map to her, but places she has a personal connection to.  I also love that she's become such a good swimmer that I can send her off to a friend's house with her swimming gear and know that she'll be fine.

Life is good for me here too.  I'm in a book club, and we just finished reading Gone Girl.  We thought it would be fun to watch the movie together and compare the two, so I invited everyone to come over for a movie night.  A couple of the women suggested getting massages while we watched the movie.  This is something I've heard of, but I've never done before, so I said sure.  My friends showed up around 8:00pm after getting their kids into bed.  Everyone got a glass of wine or beer, and then around 8:30 five masseuses showed up, one for each of us.  We had our drinks and watched the first hour of the movie while getting a massage.  The massage was great, but I was glad I had seen the movie before, since there are certain logistical issues that arise when you're trying to watch a movie and get a massage at the same time.  Despite that though, it was completely decadent, and we were all sad to see the massage ladies go after an hour.  Luckily, the movie was good, and I popped plenty of popcorn, so we enjoyed the non-massage half as well.

I feel like when we first got here, our life was on fast forward with all the new experiences.  Now, the pace has slowed down, which I appreciate, but I want to make sure I keep reminding myself that the smaller new experiences are exceptional too.